The Failed City

Five Ways to Die

Catastrophic Erasure

Cities killed by a single identifiable event. Pompeii, sealed by Vesuvius and forgotten for 1,669 years. Pripyat, evacuated in thirty-six hours after Chernobyl. Centralia, Pennsylvania, burning underground since 1962. Galveston, destroyed by a hurricane and permanently eclipsed by Houston.

Economic Exsanguination

Cities killed by the loss of the single industry that sustained them. Gary, Indiana, built by U.S. Steel and abandoned when the steel left. Cairo, Illinois, destroyed by the racial hatred of its own governing class. Flint, Michigan, poisoned by the governance structure appointed to save it. Pittsburgh, the counterargument that proves the rule.

The Utopian Misfire

Cities planned from ideological first principles that either never materialized or survived in forms unrecognizable from their original vision. Laurent, South Dakota, a planned Deaf community where more than a hundred families signed reservation forms and zero relocated. Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s failed rubber plantation in the Amazon. New Harmony, where the intellectuals lectured while the fields went unplowed. Auroville, India, sixty years old and six percent populated.

Slow Municipal Death

Cities that decline over decades through the accumulation of compounding failures, none individually fatal, all collectively lethal. St. Louis, locked inside fixed boundaries since 1876. Camden, stripped of democratic self-governance. Detroit, the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. Baltimore, declining despite the anchor institutions that should have saved it.

The Never-Built City

Cities announced, planned, and in some cases partially constructed, that never achieved the form or function described in the original vision. Masdar City, which promised zero carbon and delivered something else. The African new capitals, where government offices moved and cities did not follow. California City, 204 square miles of graded desert roads leading to empty lots.

The Diagnostic

The book builds a diagnostic framework with three levels of analysis applied to every case study. The baseline condition: what the city had before the crisis arrived, including economic diversification, institutional density, geographic position, governance structure, and racial composition. The triggering condition: the event or process that initiated the decline. And the cascade: the self-reinforcing cycle in which each indicator of failure feeds the next in a compounding loop that gains momentum with each iteration.

The framework is offered as a tool. It works for every case study in the book. The argument is that it works for cases the book does not examine, including cases that have not yet occurred.

Where the Argument Came From

A colleague at Rutgers-Newark, years ago, made a case for the publication of failure. His field was research methodology, and his contention was that failed scholarship, research rigorously conducted that ended by disproving its own thesis, deserved publication with the same velocity and seriousness as research that confirmed its hypothesis. The academic world was structurally biased toward positive results. The experiments that did not find what they were looking for were filed away, and the filing-away constituted a loss of the knowledge that the failure itself contained.

He was not a person the author admired, and the reasons for that are his own business. The argument he made that day was better than the person who made it. That fact is itself a version of the thesis this book advances: useful knowledge does not confine itself to attractive sources. The most valuable data sometimes comes from the least appealing places.

The Gap in the Literature

Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. The title promises a study of death and life. The book delivers overwhelmingly on the life. It is one of the great books of the twentieth century. It does not study death. The Failed City is the death half of the equation. The field has single-city studies and academic shrinking-cities literature. It does not have a cross-taxonomic diagnostic framework for a general readership. This book fills that gap.

A Note on the Free PDF

A book about what we bury should be available to anyone willing to dig. The free PDF is a fully formatted, 161-page reading edition with all fonts embedded, generous margins for comfortable screen reading or home printing, and the complete text including the Author’s Note, Sources Consulted, Glossary of Terms, and Chronology of Cities Examined. Download it, read it, share it. If the argument holds, it should circulate freely.

About the Author

David Boles is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher. He holds an MFA from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University. He is a dues-paying member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America. He has taught at Columbia, Rutgers, Fordham, NYU, NJIT, and UMDNJ, among other institutions. He founded The United Stage in 1985 and has operated David Boles Books Writing & Publishing since 1975. He has walked the streets described in this book and taught at the universities that serve them.

He is the host of the Human Meme podcast and the publisher of Boles.com, Boles Blogs, and Prairie Voice.